Police protection for Holocaust survivor in Italy
As an Auschwitz survivor Liliana Segre, an Italian senator for life, is an important witness of those times. After being the target of hundreds of threats and anti-Semitic insults on social media she has been assigned police guards for protection. Italy's media see this as an indictment of Italian society and draw parallels with the past.
Barbarity is back
Liliana Segre is holding up a mirror to Italy, journalist and TV presenter Sabrina Scampini comments in Huffington Post Italia:
“She has become a symbol of the danger of collective degeneration, the living representative of the lowest point in a slow and relentless cultural and human decline, the embodiment of a past so abominable that we refuse to believe that it could ever knock on our door again. ... But we live in a period of barbarity, a world of stereotypes, of fatuous phrase, ignorance and prejudice; a climate in which only confrontation counts, not listening and understanding. We are afraid to say that racism and anti-Semitism still exist because we believe that we are different. Better than we used to be.”
Salvini hasn't understood
Commenting on the case Matteo Salvini, leader of right-wing populist Lega, said he too received many threats. Salvini clearly hasn't grasped the full implications of the situation, columnist Pierluigi Battista writes angrily in Corriere della Sera:
“Comparing the death threats against Liliana Segre with the hate tirades against himself, as Lega leader Matteo Salvini has done, means that he hasn't understood that not everything is the same and comparable, that the Shoah was not just any political crime, that Liliana Segre is not the target of threats for what she says, but for what she is: Jewish. And that in the Italy of 2019 Jews are still the target of an incomparable and tenacious hatred.”